Everlong
by alaskalane
Summary: "If neither of us are married by the time we're forty, would you marry me?"
1. Chapter 1

If you sat at the top of the hill overlooking Lake Lima on the 24th of August 2011 and cast your eyes down the steep slope towards the gently lapping water of the tiny bay, you would see the huddled figures of two teenage girls whose bodies were locked together like two pieces of a puzzle.

They were watching the sun setting on the horizon, Brittany Pierce and Santana Lopez, and they were staring over the still waters into the red and orange light like it was some sort of amazing phenomenon, and it didn't happen every night; silent and unmoving. Brittany is stretched out on the stones, her right hand supporting her body weight and thrusting her chest out; her left arm draped over Santana who nuzzles into her side, tears gently running down her cheeks. Brittany strokes her back and she sighs, wrapping her arms around Brittany's waist and sinking so her head rests against the soft pillow of her breast.

"It's okay," you would hear her murmur, idly playing with Santana's long dark hair. "It'll be okay."

"It won't," she whispers back into the fabric of Brittany's t-shirt. "I won't."

"Santana, I'm so sorry –" she begins, before the Latina moans a soft 'no' and Brittany feels the wetness of fresh tears soaking through her top. She doesn't say it very loudly, but Brittany hears and presses her lips tightly together, the sunset filling her eyes as she looks away.

Santana heaves herself up a little straighter so her head leans only on Brittany's shoulder, instinctively clasping her hand and bringing it toward her own chest. "You don't have to be sorry," she says quietly, blinking her eyes free of the tears that blurred her view of the beautiful, beautiful sunset. Brittany stays silent. "It's just life. People leave. Everyone leaves."

If you weren't just a curious stranger perched on a grassy verge watching the interactions of the girls below you, you'd know what they were saying, and if you were either of them, you'd know what Santana was talking about. They were 18 and everything was changing, too much so for her.

"She didn't want to leave, San," Brittany says calmly, and it's true.

"I know that. Everyone keeps _saying_ that. But she did. And there was a whole ceremony about how she left and then we put her in a room and we burnt her, Brittany; and now she's just fucking ashes and I know she's everywhere but she's just ashes, and ashes can't…" her voice trails off as she cries, and Brittany cries a little too. "Why are you crying?" she asks, feeling the wetness on the top of her head from Brittany's cheek.

"Because you're crying,"

"And you're leaving too and now Quinn's leaving and it's not _fair,_" her mouth gapes open with huge, ugly sobs and she gasps for breath, turning her face into Brittany's shoulder.

"I'm sorry," Brittany says simply, trying in vain to focus on the lake in front of her and the light behind it. She imagines swimming through it, right now, feeling the cool water on her skin and washing her tears away and Santana's tears away and the sticky resin of the Lima summer air, and she takes a deep breath to calm down.

"No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring you into this," Santana exhales heavily, and Brittany closes her eyes with relief as she stops sobbing. "And I know my mom didn't want to go anywhere but, but –"

"Cancer's a bitch," Brittany finishes, pulling her best friend closer.

Santana nods, a shaky smile forming on her lips. "I love when you say it… Sounds like it has more meaning…" her sentence drifts away from her as Brittany's own lips crinkle upwards with some small happiness she gains from making Santana feel the tiniest bit better. "But Quinn didn't have to go anywhere." The words burst from her lips faster than she intended, and she's annoyed and ashamed when her cheeks warm and dampen with more angry, different tears.

Brittany pauses before she answers, thinking of what to say next. She could either tell Santana exactly what she thought, which was a garbled mess of 'I know what you're thinking and she shouldn't have left you like that or like this for that matter but you have to understand that it's what she needs to do and if you got in her way you know you'd regret it forever and you shouldn't be that sad because you're the best person I know and you'll find someone else and you can be happy again', or she could present a loosely abridged version to try and get through to Santana and appeal to her sense of rationality. "It's what she needed to do, San. You know that, you know you know, and you know that deep down you want her to go,"

Santana sniffs, the tears driving from her eyes to her cheeks now reaching a steady downpour. "She didn't even say goodbye," her voice breaks and Brittany wants to hold her beautiful face in both her hands and stare her right in the eyes, and tell her that she _knows _Quinn hates goodbyes and that there's a handwritten letter on the paper that feels expensive between your fingers lying on her bed, and that she'll read it when she gets home and she'll be mad at first, but then she'll really understand why Quinn's going and she'll probably write a letter back and go to sleep with her head heavy from tears and whiskey but then she'll wake up and be on the way to mending. But she can't, because Quinn told her not to say anything when she drove to Brittany's that morning with the letter and a bag of Santana's stuff in her boot, along with her own bags ready for a long haul flight to Oxford.

"She loves you, Santana. She knows you, and she knows that you'll be okay. Life goes on," and Brittany knows that it's only okay to say that because she's Brittany and Santana would never, ever get mad at her.

She's just sad. She's slumped on the ground sadly, her shoulder sagging sadly; her eyes open and staring sadly at Brittany's own. And while such sadness is temporary, it is so consuming and unsurpassable when you're stuck drowning in it that it's all you can do to wave your arms and kick your legs and hope that something tugs you to shore where you can lie panting and grateful, and alive.

"Man, I'm sorry, Britt," Santana brings her forearm to her face and almost angrily wipes it free of tears. Brittany just takes her wrist and holds it, her fingers splaying easily around the jutting bone. "I'm sorry you're stuck here with me – I shouldn't have drunk anything, you know how it gets… You should be at home, packing or something…"

"San, I basically live at yours," Brittany reminds her, still gripping the Latina's wrist. If she didn't she wouldn't have known that Santana was late back from Quinn's, and she wouldn't have known that there was a bottle of her father's whiskey missing from 'the whiskey cupboard' and she wouldn't have known where to find Santana's car keys when she saw that her mother's old Lexus was missing. She still would have known where to find her, though; because she knew everything about her. "And I've been packed since last week, you know that. You're packed too, remember?"

"We're all leaving, Britt." Santana sits up a little straighter, pulling her arm away from Brittany's and pressing her thumbs to her eyes, smudging her makeup to the very edge of her face. "Like, we're all properly leaving. Everything's changing," she says, her voice stronger than it was before but still thick and uncertain.

"_We _don't have to change," Brittany says, and she means it.

Santana laughs, low and empty. "We don't have to, but we will," she raises her hand when Brittany opens her mouth to protest, continuing in the same sad tone. "Britt, don't look at me like that. It's true."

Brittany shakes her head, slowly, in disbelief. "San, don't be so negative. 16 years is a long time to have the same best friend by your side, and – no, you let me finish – and I don't believe that number means nothing to you. You can't say you're just giving up."

"I'm not giving up. Three thousand is a pretty meaningful number, too. No, two thousand, nine hundred and four point nine because that's roughly how far –"

"Julliard is from Stanford. I know." Brittany hangs her head, muttering her words. She hated when Santana was pessimistic and all one-track minded. It's her nature and Brittany accepts that but it's so tiring, working to convince another person when you're only halfway to convincing yourself. "It doesn't mean we can't carry on."

Santana sighs from the very bottom of her lungs, and the subject is considered closed. If they don't talk about it, it's not real; that's the unspoken mutual agreement they've come to of late. The sun has all but disappeared by now, and the sky is one that's cloud-free and twinkling with the light of an unimaginable amount of stars; so they lie back at the exact same time and take one another's hand while the stars are reflected and shining in their eyes. A silence shrouds them as they stretch serenely on the shore, and neither of them knows how long it is since they've been looking up.

"They're beautiful," Santana says at last, using her free hand to point up at the sky. "Ursa Major, and Ursa Minor. They're like us," she murmurs into the darkness.

"But you hate stars, San."

"I don't hate the stars. I hate how they're so far away that by the time we can see them they're already dead. I hate how not even something that watches over everything and knows everything is able to offer permanence," she replies flatly, lazily pointing out more constellations. "Andromeda, Scutum, Cygnus." Her mother was into stargazing, and they used to lie in the garden on summer nights and she would show them all the different patterns made in the sky. Brittany could never remember them and stopped trying after the third time, instead basking in the glory of the universe, while Santana's tongue poked out from her lips as she concentrated fervently on remembering each and every constellation her mom taught her.

"Is that one Delphinus?" Brittany ventures, pointing to a star to their far north.

Santana smiles and Brittany can hear it in her voice. "Yeah. How did you know?"

"You told me, of course," and Santana shuffles a little closer so they can feel each other's heartbeats.

"There's my legacy," she breathes lightly, squeezing Brittany's hand. "I'm so happy I have you, Britt. This is perfect – well, none of this is perfect," she continues, waving her hand above them for emphasis as she talks. It's a European thing, she would tell Brittany; when she finished a particularly impassioned speech and Brittany was just sat giggling at the bizarre movements of her hands to go with her words. "But this – you and me, our whole thing – this, is perfect."

"I love you," Brittany whispers back, letting out an inadvertent sad little whimper because Santana's talking like it's all ending.

"So here's the thing. I've wanted to ask you for ages, actually…" Brittany waits as Santana takes a deep breath before opening her mouth to speak again. "Would you marry me?"

"I –"

"I know you're not gay, silly. That's not what I'm saying. If neither of us are married by the time we're forty, will you marry me?"

"Can we make it thirty seven?"

Santana knows by now not to ask Brittany why. "Yeah, of course."

"Then yes. Santana Marie Lopez, I will marry you. I'll marry my best friend in twenty years' time and our house can have a designated duck room for our kids."

Santana giggles. "Promise? Pinky promise?"

"All the promises in the world, apart from the ones made by politicians."

Santana laughs again and the sound is so lovely that Brittany joins in, and the little waves lap against the shore like they're laughing too; and the stars twinkle a little brighter like they're laughing; like they know something.

* * *

Life happened. It happened for both of them; life in its strange habit of just being there and continuing while you're busy trying your very best to work out what's going on.

For Santana, life was an honour in a law degree from Stanford University and a nervous 22 year old moving to a completely new city alone. San Francisco, she figured, was the perfect place for her. It was a city, sure; and a fucking brilliant one, but it was softer than New York or Los Angeles and she fell in love with it almost instantly. There was something in the air, she concluded one night, sat on her balcony with a glass of red wine and a cigarette. Something in the air she breathed seeped into her blood and beat through her heart and mind and somehow, everything was better.

And so she lived. She lived with her college roommate and best friend, Peter – who she would look at and see a strange mixture of Kurt and Blaine in his love for fashion and flamboyancy and his love too for boxing and tinkering with things around the apartment – for four more years, being young and carefree and successful. Dating a string of women (mainly blondes); mainly lasting about three or four months. She was hot and there were plenty of beautiful women to go around, so why settle down? They were often the best looking people in the hundreds of bars they went to and they had their pick, Santana with her long dark hair and sultry dark eyes and Peter with his cheekbones and classic Greek looks; she'd be lying if she said they didn't mess around.

Quinn loved Peter, and so did Mercedes. Quinn came over at Thanksgiving and Christmas and often over summer, so they would meet in Lima, and then she would spend a lot of her time in California with her new British girlfriend who reminded Santana of a slightly blazed and mellowed Rachel Berry; and at first it stung a little – just a little – when she saw Quinn running toward her in the airport followed by a midget brunette who was carrying her bag for her, but she got over it, and Quinn was her maid of honour six years later. She saw a lot of Mercedes – and by proxy, Sam - who would drive to the beach when she wasn't working, and stop in to see Santana on the way. Perhaps she and Mercedes weren't the closest in high school, but it was like some sort of unspoken agreement was in place so they could gossip and catch one another up on the latest happenings with their old friends. It was nice, and Mercedes was blunt and sassy and made Santana laugh like a malfunctioning drain with her anecdotes about Kurt and Rachel during the time she had spent with them in New York.

It was a case of work hard, play hard. She worked her ass off for all the things she had, like a nice – albeit drunkenly purchased - Porsche with the number plate P3T3 5AN and a nice fucking apartment in downtown San Francisco. Work was good, too. Hard sometimes, but she was ultimately glad she had chosen the right thing for her to do. She was a defence attorney, and it _had _been said that she was one of the best in the country. Well, state. It was comfortable, and she was happy. And when everything else is going right, the only natural thing to do would be to meet someone, and settle down, and have a family.

So she did. It wasn't deliberate, but some things just creep up on you. Isabella was half Russian, beautiful, a struggling journalist-turned-teacher; a blues singer and pianist on the side. Santana was drunk when they met. Drunk, standing on a table singing Etta James, while Isabella stared at her and missed the big piano bridge because of her legs. That was when she was 26, and Isabella pursued her for about six months, catching her on her 27th Valentine's Day with a candlelit dinner and a moonlit serenade; and in that moment she felt so wanted and so happy she burst into tears. She took Isabella to Lima with her on her 27th Thanksgiving (and her dad said then he knew then it was serious), and around her 28th birthday Peter announced he was moving in with his boyfriend and he had already taken the liberty of inviting Isabella to move in to their apartment in his place. He had a habit of doing things like that, and Santana often wondered how long it would have taken her to ask Isabella herself. It was like she understood, Isabella, and that was why she stuck around for so long. They were crazy similar, Quinn would point out with an unspoken question lingering in her hazel eyes on her annual visit, and Santana would flip her off with a roll of her eyes and remand her for being jealous.

It was Santana who proposed. It wasn't eloquent or calm and it didn't even make much sense. The auditorium shit Finn had pulled with Rachel back in high school always dwelled in the back of her mind as she tossed and turned in bed, and she came to the eventual decision that it was the only thing special enough for Isabella, with whom she was completely in love with. But it ended up a disaster, and Santana could only garble the words as they ran across a park with police sirens blaring in their ears. She didn't even get to sing. But Isabella said yes, and Santana's hands tangled in her blonde hair as they lay side by side in a ditch, kissing like they would never get another chance to.

They both wore lovely white dresses, and Quinn wore a red maid of honour halterneck with Peter wearing a matching red suit. She got the wedding she had always dreamt of. The only factor she hadn't incorporated was the attendance of every single member of the old Glee club (apart from Brittany), who insisted on providing the entertainment for a good half of the night. Secretly, she loved it. Kurt and Rachel performed the song Isabella chose for their first dance; coincidentally, a stripped down version of I Want to Hold Your Hand (Santana cried because her mom would have loved be there) and Blaine played the piano.

Blaine played the piano at the christening of their daughter Evelyn, too. In all ways she was the spitting image of her mami, with the exception of her bright blue eyes which belay the eastern-European ancestry of her mama's family. Santana carried Evelyn when she was 29 with donor sperm from a brother of Isa's who lived out in Colorado and functioned as 'the best uncle'. Santana was happy to accept this, and Isa was happy their child wouldn't be all 'Hispanic and dark broody eyes'. Isa was so busy with work at the time that it simply wasn't practical for her to get pregnant, so Santana gave up her job and focussed instead on balancing soda cans on her growing belly.

It was a huge apartment and two Porsches bought with two sizeable incomes, it was a sparky little girl who amazed Santana more and more every day, it was two gay godfathers and a piano in every room; it was house hunting and tiny booties and sleepless nights. It was stressful. It was hard. It was perfect.

When Santana was 32 and Evie was three and Isa was 30, a thick letter through the post changed everything. Santana had taken up the mantle of the stay-at-home-mom, and loved it, and Isa had taken up the mantle of breadwinner, and loved it. But it meant that Isa was able to progress and discover and change in ways Santana simply couldn't, and it meant that Isa was offered a permanent gig in New York City at the Smoke jazz and blues club having applied in secret and created her own compositions on the piano that Santana paid for.

'How was I supposed to know it would come to anything?' she would say as they lay not speaking following terse discussion after terse discussion about a potential move, reaching no viable conclusions every time.

'You went behind my back,' Santana would reply, keeping her voice low as not to wake Evie up. 'I can't understand why you'd do something like that.'

'I'm not asking you for anything, Santana. You know I love you and Eve more than I can possibly articulate, and you know if you said the word I'd drop everything altogether.'

'And you know I'd never do that to you. You know I'd never be so selfish.'

So it was utterly miserable for three years of marriage, with Isa spending only three cumulative months at home – a month in spring, the odd week in summer or winter, the odd surprise weekend – in a year. Evelyn rushed into a blonde stranger's arms at San Francisco airport after Isa had been in New York for a particularly long stretch of time. It was sort of ambivalent, in the end. It was just the hand they'd been dealt, and perhaps it was fate; who knows? They were in love, and then they weren't. Shit happens, Santana told Quinn (who had married her little half-assed Rachel Berry) and Kurt (who had settled with Blaine in New York with adoption plans after years of ghosting around one another) and Peter (who lived two blocks away with Edward, his long-term boyfriend) and anyone else who asked. Shit happens, and life goes on. 'Y así va' was tattooed on her wrist the year after their divorce, and she reminded herself and Evelyn of it every day. And so it goes.

Isa visited about as often as she had in the time they had spent married and apart, and it was okay. It would be a lie if Santana were to say she coped perfectly well all of the time, and it would be a lie if she said she had never called Peter in the middle of the night in hysterics to tell him just how afraid she was of being alone and it would be a lie if she was to say she hadn't leant heavily on a six year old in the first few months after being plunged into single parenthood. She got her act together, though; packed up Isa's old stuff and went back to work and enrolled Evie in the best private school in San Francisco. It was okay from then on in; not perfect, but okay. She had brilliant friends and a brilliant job and a brilliant, brilliant daughter, but still. There was something missing.

She's two months older than Brittany.

* * *

For Brittany, life was trying to make the best of the pathetically small amount of time you actually had to live. And this meant travelling, and a fuckload of it at that. It was New York that did it for her; she was amazed how one city could be so big and have so many stories bursting at its seams and so she found herself endlessly intrigued and hopelessly in love with the wider world around her.

She graduated Julliard a year early, and did a year of teaching dozens of dance classes a week all over the city to amass enough money for her first flight out of America and a few years of cheap living after that. She didn't exactly have herself a plan, but what did that matter? Just being was enough, and so it was enough. In the year after university she spent in the Empire State she lived in an apartment in Greenwich with five other broke graduates, talking about their dreams and their lives and their wishes and all the _big questions _– what's the real meaning of life? is no man truly an island, or can he exist with no relationships? if there is such thing as the placebo effect, what's the point of the real thing? – drinking a lot of shroom tea and swallowing a lot of acid tabs. There were three men; Sam (blonde, potential long-lost brother), Joe (the only white guy in the entire world to pull off dreadlocks, spiritual), and Alex (dark, dropped out of Columbia, in desperate search of himself); and two women, Brittany, and Marisa (curly haired and Italian, mysterious, sort of sad) and they all lived together and disembarked the plane together when it landed in India a year later, on Brittany's 22nd birthday.

It was a blur. Everything went so fast and so slow at the same time that Brittany struggled to keep up with it, and it felt a lot like she was trying so hard to live that her actual life passed her by a little.

It was a rather unique routine she lived by. While her friends all returned home one by one she stayed out in Asia, backpacking from India to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, to Thailand. She stayed in northern Thailand for a few months, working at a Chiang Mai bakery to make a little extra money for her travel expenses; sleeper trains, ordinary commuter trains (not an experience she would relive in a hurry), the occasional car hire, the occasional short hop flight. Places she liked, she would stay a little longer and get a job to sustain her already cheap living. She was 23 and a half when she landed back home at JFK with a tan and a pattern of mosquito bites over her back, and 24 when she left again. Brazil, this time; starting in Rio and moving around the country with the ease of a woman who had nowhere else to be.

All her friends kind of found themselves, in the end. Eventually. Sure, Brittany met people on her travels and had possibly the biggest email contact list of anyone in the whole world, but it was her insatiable need for constant stimulation and discovery that meant that she never _really _settled down. Work for six months in New York (it turns out there's a never-ending need for dance teachers), travel for six months, meet amazing people and see amazing things and then come home and make obligatory visits to her family and friends, and do it all over again. It's not really that tiring, and Brittany would choose no other life.

India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia. China and Japan. The Federated States of Micronesia, a personal favourite of hers. Australia, and New Zealand, and Tasmania. Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar. Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina. Ireland, Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Serbia, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Norway… They were her life; her friends, her lovers, her enemies.

No strings attached, and that was the way she liked it. It was the Netherlands which captured her heart, and when she was 31 she took out a five year lease on an apartment in Jordaan, east Amsterdam, where she was surrounded by yuppies and creative types and the sort of people who would listen to her when she was telling a story about her time as a 'tea expert' in southern China. And she met Daniel. 32 and Dutch, captivating, a man with same wants and dreams and love of travel as Brittany; but a man who felt obliged and suffocated into a marriage with his high school lover.

There never was a plan, but Brittany figured if there was, it would not involve her as the 'other woman'. The phrase itself even seemed wrong to her, because with Daniel it was so intense and beautiful that she never felt there was anyone else threatening to halve his attention. They met in a bar, him drinking away the last fight he had with his wife; and her drinking in celebration of a close Dutch friend's engagement. Their eyes met across the room and they stayed long after it was emptying, only moving close together at the very end of the night. Brittany was a little drunk then, and she cried in a stranger's arms about how she didn't know whether or not she was happy for her friend, or sad and bitter and jealous because she had never even had a serious relationship; and Daniel cried because he felt like his wife didn't love him anymore and he had nobody to turn to. He said the word lonely, and Brittany suddenly sobbed uncontrollably into her drink because it was the word she was most afraid of. She thought she wasn't lonely, not really; she had dozens of friends from all over the world and plenty of opportunities to take up offers for relationships with men and women, but deep down she knew that when she was lying awake at three in the morning, there was nobody around.

Daniel was gorgeous; chestnut hair bouncing just above his shoulders, chestnut stubble adorning his cheeks, big, strong arms from a past of playing rugby (what even was rugby?), slightly calloused hands and a striking pair of green eyes. In the first year of their knowing one another, Brittany finally understood the term emotional affair; and on the anniversary of their meeting, Daniel turned up to her apartment and things became really, really physical. She knew he was married and she was so, so wrong, but it just felt so right.

He travelled a lot for work (as an actuary) and so there were no questions asked when he went abroad for weeks at a time, only now he had company.

'Fuck London,' he said, and Brittany agreed as they lay in bed and booked tickets on Thai Airways departing the next day from Amsterdam International.

It was a complex and bittersweet world of lies. Brittany didn't know whether Daniel's wife was stupid or just stupidly staying quiet. He was careful, though. He would get up in the middle of the night to email her from wherever they were at the time it would be in London, he would make sure he had pound coins and British notes and British business cards in his wallet if she ever were to check, he kept his passport in a safe in his office and shredded his flight details after he used them, he even skyped her wearing a suit and a black scarf from a sweltering hotel room with no air-con. Brittany shrugged it off as best she could, because being with Daniel made her so ridiculously happy it was easy to forget everything that was wrong with their relationship. She took him to the mountains in northern Thailand, on a sleeper boat down the Mekong River, to temple after temple in Macau. He showed her his favourite places in Europe, and as Brittany lay on Daniel's chest on the side of a glorious mountain in Croatia with her legs covered by a tartan blanket watching the sun go down over a glorious lake, she felt so alive and wonderful that she could pretend everything was really okay.

She was 32 when they returned to Amsterdam and picked their lives up again. Daniel spent much of his time at Brittany's, and they would travel whenever they could to wherever they could, as long as they were together. Little voices in Brittany's head whispered intermittently about their own apartment and travelling without it being a secret and maybe their own marriage and possibly children (it was perfect, so perfect); but she shushed them when it became clear Daniel was not prepared to leave his wife, for whatever reason. Their affair continued until one day about a month after Brittany's 35th birthday, when his wife's father passed away from a long battle with pneumonia. She knew something was wrong when he arrived at her apartment with red-rimmed eyes and his head bowed low, and she struggled to work out what it was.

'I can't do this anymore,' he said, and that was it.

Brittany left Amsterdam soon after that. She didn't want to stay any longer, there was nothing tying her to the place; she felt nothing walking the cobbled streets and under the hanging baskets, just cold and alone swinging her legs over the Prinsengacht, and just incomprehensibly sad when she walked past their old favourite coffee shop. Daniel paid for her flight to New York and she wondered if it was his way of coming to terms with their affair in his head – I sent her away; he'd be able to think. I did the right thing in the end.

And so she was sat on her apartment balcony with Sam and Marisa (even they were married now. Brittany cried for two hours) on her 37th birthday, holding a tumbler of whiskey in her left hand and toasting herself for still being alive. The light catches on her ring finger as if it's mocking her, and all of a sudden, she remembers.

She doesn't even know if Santana's still married, doesn't even have her address or current mobile number, so she rushes into her apartment and pulls out her laptop.

_I'm in if you're in._

_B x_

Shit. What was she doing? She wasn't even that drunk. Sam comes in behind her, and peers over her shoulder as Brittany stares at the screen, her finger hovering over the send button. She just wishes that Santana was here, now; that they could be drinking and laughing together on the balcony. It could be perfect.

"What are you doing?" he asks, confusion spreading over his face.

She explains. It's a long story.

* * *

Santana was right, in the end. It wasn't the same. It did change, and it didn't 'carry on', as Brittany had hoped. It was quite good while they were both still at college and returning home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so they could see each other at least twice a year; sometimes at summer too. It was like they picked up right where they had left off every single time, so perhaps they became complacent in the upholding of their relationship in their early twenties. They both just assumed it would be okay. But Santana started to work and got a new best friend and surrounded herself with new people, and Brittany herself started to spend less and less time actually in the country. They met up for a weekend while Santana was in New York with work and Brittany was on one of her stretches at home earning money, but it was painfully obvious they had neglected their relationship and the silences became longer and the common ground became less. They were 25 then, and it was the first time they'd seen one another in well over a year. A week after Santana returned home she realised just how sad it was to lose something that had once been so utterly brilliant, and called Brittany to arrange another meeting date. Brittany was in Costa Rica. She called again a few weeks later, and again after that, and a few more times over the next few months, eventually giving up. Her messages were deleted automatically before Brittany got back.

They were still friends, though, and remained friends until Brittany didn't even RSVP to Santana's wedding. She was in Madagascar and had been touring Africa for around a year and Santana had insisted on posting the invites proper old-fashioned like, so the first she knew of the event was in an internet café in Cape Town, looking at an email from Quinn with dozens of attached photos. She almost burst into tears, and again when she read the message underneath.

_'Hope you're doing well… Santana's wedding was a few weeks ago, lovely girl… she was a little upset at your absence, and I'm just pissed off because you couldn't even RSVP… she had a place set for you on her table because she thought you might just have forgotten… scratch little upset, she was really upset… I really think you should get in touch and offer her a pretty good explanation… I don't think she's that angry, just disappointed…'_

Brittany knew she probably was angry, and so she didn't get in touch with her. At the time, there was no good reason to. She told Quinn to inform her of Brittany's change of residence three years later, and received an email from Santana with a few attached photographs a few months after.

_'Britt, I hope everything's okay over there and Europe isn't too cold. I miss you. Evelyn wants to meet her auntie Brittany. When are you next over? X'_

_'I don't think I'll be over for a while. Sorry I keep letting you down. I want to meet Evelyn too, she's beautiful. I'll be in touch soon. Brittany x'_

That was their last exchange; Brittany explained as Sam nodded slowly, processing all the information she had laid on him in the past hour.

"So you really, really miss her?"

"Yeah. I do."

"Do you think this could come to anything?"

"I don't think so. We were just kids, like so much has changed, I don't even think she's single –"

"But what's the harm in trying, right? Send it," Sam says, a hand gently placed on Brittany's shoulder. "What have you really got to lose?"

So Brittany sent it, and stayed awake all night, tossing and turning under her sheets because there was something, just something, in the back of her mind that would not let it lie. The time difference meant she received her reply at four in the morning, just as she was dropping off.

_I'm coming to New York tomorrow. We have a lot of talking to do._

_I'm in, by the way._

_S x_

All of a sudden, the idea of sleep was laughable.

**magda, this is for you. just pondering some logistics. i love you, ciągle.**


	2. Chapter 2

**so i wasn't really planning on continuing this, but i was thinking about it the other day and i was just like 'you know what, yeah, i have a bit of an idea'. so i decided to write a little more, and almost in an ****_act of fate_**** i partly tore the ligament in my ankle after making the kind of disastrous decision to get drunk and go sledging, so here i am, bed and laptop bound until the swelling goes town, working on this and a few other little one-shots for which you shall have to be patient. silver lining, no? i hope you like it, i'd love a review. thanks!**

Brittany is nervous. It's not that Santana makes her nervous; it's that this whole situation makes her nervous. The fact that any reason she would have to be nervous would be entirely her fault makes her nervous, the fact that Santana knows that as well makes her nervous, and the weight of the ring in her trouser pocket makes her more nervous than she even wants to think about.

She could have sworn it had got heavier with every minute Santana was late.

When they were girls, Brittany had been absolutely mortified every time Santana and Quinn would insist on showing up late to parties and meals and events they were invited to, and even more embarrassed when they would show up both late and drunk. Santana always used to say that it built suspense, and that it got people at the party talking about them before they had even arrived.

And having never been on the other end of this suspense, Brittany had no idea what it really felt like to be checking her watch every thirty seconds and needing the bathroom every two minutes and fidgeting around in her seat, obsessively staring at the door.

It wasn't pleasant.

She got up a few times to order a coffee for herself, though really it should have been a tranquilizer seeing as the very last thing she needed was to be even more het up than she already was. She couldn't even call Santana to ask her where she was because the only thing they had arranged was to meet up in a little café in the Village at half past two in the afternoon of the fifteenth of May and they hadn't even exchanged numbers. Honestly, Brittany didn't even know her last name.

Or her coffee order, not anymore. But she orders a low fat caramel macchiato anyway, just in case, because that was Santana's favourite and she always used to say 'who wouldn't want to actually consume an oxymoron?'.

She checked her phone incessantly out of habit, and almost missed the text from Rachel Berry to inform her that Santana would be over in about fifteen minutes. She took a deep breath, and bought a slice of chocolate fudge cake for the two of them to share, her foot tapping agitatedly on the ground and her fingers picking at the fraying tablecloth.

* * *

"And what do we do when Auntie Rachel tries to make us sing and we really, really don't want to?" Santana picks her eight year old daughter up and swings her by the armpits around in a circle in the middle of Rachel's apartment, chuckling.

Evelyn was all legs and gapped teeth and wavy dark hair, and her face lights up with giggles as her mami plants a kiss on her forehead and her feet on the ground.

"We threaten to drop her Tony award from the very top of the Rock-feller centre!" she shouts in response, laughing even harder at Rachel's gasp of outrage from the other side of the breakfast bar and running round and round her mami's, her hands trailing a line across Santana's waist.

"Rockefeller, babe," Santana absentmindedly corrects, and Evelyn shrugs it off and runs to the other side of the room, launching herself into a very expensive leather massage chair and pressing all the buttons. "Eve –" she begins, but Rachel cuts her off with a raise of her hand.

"Please, Santana. Don't worry about it." She pauses, and Santana smiles gratefully. "Does she always run this much?"

Santana glances over at the bouncing figure of her daughter, who has descended into a fit of giggles having discovered the vibration setting on Rachel's posh chair. "Uh, yeah. Pretty much. And she always wants to sing. Sorry, Rach…"

But Rachel just smiles and Santana can't help but notice the sadness, and she takes her hand across the counter. "I really appreciate this, Rach. Like, really. Evelyn is pretty much obsessed with you, by the way. I don't know how she managed it to get around my internet firewalls, but she saw you in the 45th anniversary concert of Les Mis on some media site and she kept asking me how it felt to share the stage with you in high school. I didn't know what to say." Santana grins and winks, and Rachel knits her fingers together and giggles a little and this time it reaches her eyes.

"You're just saying that. You know that singing with me was the best part of your day. And honestly, I love seeing you and your beautiful little girl, even if that means I have to purchase another Leather-Massage-Maxi-Chair-E23, like so be it. It's worth it."

Santana just pulls her into a tight, warm hug, and Rachel relaxes into her, her brown eyes pooling despite herself. Santana wishes she knew what to do when the unhappiness was so blaringly obvious, but they both know that Rachel made a choice and Santana knows that some things are better left unsaid, so she settles for just holding her. The two of them are hit by a running eight year old who throws her arms around them and they stumble in tandem, grinning as Evelyn begins a little recital of Defying Gravity, knowing that Rachel won't be able to resist joining in.

And so they break apart and Santana watches appreciatively as her daughter and one of her closest friends provide her with a perfect performance of their favourite Wicked song. Rachel is a Broadway veteran by now. Name a musical, and it's likely she's been in it; and so it's the strangest thing to watch Evelyn harmonise perfectly and copy her dance moves a second after she performs them. She knows she's biased, but Santana would say she has one of the most talented daughters in America. The northern hemisphere. The world.

Santana claps and whoops as they finish, and Evelyn pitches herself at her for a hug. Over her daughter's shoulder, she calls to Rachel who is pouring them both a drink of water in the kitchen. "Don't you dare teach her On My Own, she knows it makes me cry and she'll use it to her advantage, this little cheeky – ow! – Eve! Don't slap my butt!"

Rachel bursts out laughing and Santana pretends to knock her daughter about the head with a 'this is what your Abuela would do to me, young lady!', before a thought suddenly flashes across her mind and she glances quickly at her watch.

"Oh, balls, I'm late already," she curses, and Rachel tuts as she gathers her shoes and her purse from the counter and presses quick kisses to Evelyn and Rachel's cheeks, tugging her jacket on and hopping towards the door. "I'll call you with the plans for tonight, alright? Eve, be good. Rachel, don't let her boss you around. Not too much singing," she shouts over her shoulder and pulls the door shut, stepping straight into the lift that belonged to the penthouse.

"Rachie," Evelyn starts after her mami has safely entered the lift. "What's balls?"

Santana doesn't begin to get nervous until she's stepped out of Rachel's building and the enormity of her rash decision to even email Brittany back really starts to set in. She shamelessly stops herself from thinking about it as she hails a cab, for the entire journey over, for every step toward the door. It hits her as her hand closes over the handle and she catches a glimpse of floaty blonde hair.

* * *

Brittany stands up the second Santana walks in and tentatively wraps her arms around the smaller woman, knowing it's the right thing to have done when Santana's hands pause mid-air for a split second and then find their comfortable resting spot on the curve of her back. They fit. They always have done, and they always will do.

"Hey," Brittany says softly, into Santana's ear.

"Hey yourself," she replies, burying her face into the crook of Brittany's neck. "Long time no see."

She takes a seat and drains the caramel macchiato and orders two more, finding Brittany's eyes with a slightly taken aback 'you remembered'.

"So –" she begins, after she's explained where Evelyn is staying and shown Brittany pictures of the two of them together taken on holiday in Paris and they've exchanged all the necessary pleasantries you might share with an ordinary acquaintance.

And they move on to hold twenty years' worth of conversations and they giggle and chat and it's almost like an ordinary pair of really old friends who had drifted away from one another under ordinary circumstances having an ordinary catch up.

But this isn't ordinary, and after four hours of talking about anything but the issues that divide them and the one that brings them together, Brittany can't contain herself any longer. "So I really really screwed up staying in touch with you and I'm so so sorry, I can't believe I missed everything and you won't believe how bad I feel about it all, it's just –"

Santana tries to interrupt her, but she presses on.

"I'm so sorry, like I know I was dumb and immature and even though yeah, maybe sometimes I was in Africa when you sent wedding invitations out, but I should've been the first to know you were even getting married. I should've been your best friend and I wasn't, and it breaks my heart, like every single day." She pauses, and draws in a shaky breath. Santana digs her thumb into her palm and stares straight into her eyes. "I was really messed up, and I didn't know what to do when I moved away, and when it didn't work out I couldn't bring myself to contact you when I got back because I just think like, subconsciously, I couldn't face up to hearing all about how great everything had turned out for you and how I wasn't a part of any of it because I was too stupid –"

"You're not stupid," Santana cut in, something flaring deep inside her stomach.

"- to actually open my eyes to my heart and realise that I was actually in love with you, and I probably always have been."

Brittany cries openly now, her hand finding Santana's across the table. Santana is fighting her own tears, biting at her lip continually to try and stop them from spilling over.

"And like I know that we were never together, I just don't think I ever really understood what love actually was until I got my heart broken." She sighs dramatically, and a little smile quirks across Santana's lips. "But it's kind of like a different type of love, the one I have for you. It's like a longing, like I can't properly describe it. It's not like an infatuation or an obsession or even something hugely romantic, it's just like a want to always be around you and a kind of emptiness when I'm not. Even when I was off finding myself, I would just be sitting somewhere beautiful in some foreign land and I'd be thinking about you and how much I wished you were there. I think that scared me, more than scared me, because I didn't think that was normal. It's not normal love, it's like –"

Brittany stops to compose herself and hastily drags her forearm across her eyes to dismiss any untoward tears. Santana is completely stunned, sat utterly silent.

"It's just like I never understood what love actually was, and I'm only understanding in retrospect, like now or when I was on the plane home from Amsterdam and I was thinking that the way I loved Daniel, the way I loved that city, the way I loved Thailand and the way I loved you, they were all completely different things…" she trails off, blinking away the last of her tears and gripping Santana's fingers against her own, willing her to just say something, anything.

"I love you, too," Santana says, finally, and means it. She makes no attempt to wipe at the tears that are sliding down her cheeks and taking her eye makeup with them because she wasn't expecting to cry and she didn't use her damn waterproof mascara; she simply stares at Brittany and finds herself back twenty years and crying on a park bench in the middle of Lima, Ohio.

"Marry me," Brittany replies simply, evenly, her voice completely still and calm, her eyes tracking the shock as it spreads across Santana's face. "Marry me," she repeats, and it's more of a command than a request.

"Okay." It sounds lame, but it's all Santana can come up with as her mind races with logistics and what-the-fucks and New Yorks and weddings and San Franciscos and Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn. "Yeah, I'll marry you." Her words come out and betray her mind, just like that, and Brittany grins and places the ring on her finger having dropped elaborately to one knee somewhere in the middle of Santana's thought process.

"May I?"

Santana nods slowly, and Brittany can feel her smile as she lightly presses her lips against hers as you might an old friend and tastes her cherry lipbalm.

"How are we going to-" Santana starts, balling her hands into small fists and poking her tongue to the side like she always did – does – when she's concentrating. Brittany just stares, happy to have her back.

"Relax. We'll work that out after the wedding."

* * *

"Is it not weird like, in the slightest?" Quinn's tongue pokes out of the corner of her mouth as she sews an old jumper of Evelyn's back together, perching on Santana's balcony with a glass of red wine and flowers knotted through her hair.

Their relationship may have been an ill-fated one of the past, but Santana and Quinn were best friends and they were having a rare moment of respite in the week before the wedding, with a bottle of red wine and a beaten up packet of lights between them like the old days.

"What are you like, referring to?" Santana murmurs in response, exhaling deeply over the San Franciscan skyline and turning to Quinn with a lazily cocked eyebrow.

Quinn puts the jumper down on the table in front of her and grips her own wine glass, her eyes not meeting Santana's but joining them in their empty gaze over the city. "I don't really know," she shrugs, speaking slowly and measuredly, her words drawn out.

"Q, spit it out." Santana leans over and knocks Quinn gently on the arm, and she chuckles before responding in that same slow and even tone.

"Is it not going to be really strange? Because you were never like, together, or whatever…"

Santana drums her fingers around the body of her glass and smiles, lights shining in her eyes. "I'm not drunk enough to talk about this with you yet," she says simply, with a wink, and Quinn tuts before standing up and proffering the wine bottle.

"Right. You drink two glasses of wine and I'll make sure the kids are in bed and call Katherine, and when I'm back down we can discuss it."

And in her no-nonsense manner, she swings her body through the balcony hatch and slams it shut behind her, leaving Santana grinning and alone with her thoughts in the warm evening air.

She drinks one and a half glasses of wine by the time Quinn has checked on her son and her goddaughter and called her wife who was working at home in Santa Rosa and she's feeling more than chatty when Quinn takes her seat once more and lights one of Santana's cigarettes. Santana starts speaking the second she relaxes.

"Alright, Fabray. Here's the deal. There's like, different types of love. I'm going to need you not to interrupt me because I already can't believe I'm about to fucking share this."

Quinn giggles. "I promise."

"Right. So yeah, there's different types of love. Like you and I, when we were a thing all those years ago, we were lonely and angry and confused. We needed it, so I loved you like you needed to be loved and you loved me like I needed to be loved. It's still love. You get me?"

Quinn nods, a sad smile lifting the corners of her mouth. Yeah, she gets it.

"I never loved anyone or even pretended to love anyone until Isabella, unless you're counting that girl who used to work in the Sunflower Café because I think I was pretty much head-over heels for her during my first Pride when I was twenty two, but I don't remember very much of our time together and the little I do is kind of addled. First and last time I have ever and will ever tried or try LSD. That's probably just infatuation." She snaps her fingers. "Not love."

Quinn just snorts into her wine glass and props her legs up in front of her.

"So, yeah. Isabella. I do still love her, but in a different way. Like when I met her and everything was perfect and I was so wonderfully happy, I felt like the only thing left to do was fall in love with her properly. So I sort of did. I always thought she was hot, but it was almost just fitting for us to be in love. We had everything else. I just learnt to love her and we almost consciously shaped how we fell in love and it like, wasn't always there. So if everything else changed then it might not work, and that's exactly what happened. But we have Evelyn and we're both happy now so whatever we wrought it still being put to good use. Like that doorstop my abuelo made for me that I use to wedge the fridge against the plug."

Quinn takes a deep breath and opens her mouth to say something but a single glare from Santana is enough to leave the words lingering in the back of her throat, and she stays accordingly silent.

"And with Brittany, it's like it's always been there. Since forever, we just didn't realise. Thinking back, everything we did was like what you'd do if you were in love. Our physical intimacy, our shared desires, like, what we wanted; it's kind of always been there on some sort of level. All the time I've wanted to be with her in a sense of literally beside her, like I even set her a place at my goddamn first wedding because I so desperately wanted her around. It was an undercurrent because as far as I was aware, she was straight; and why would I put myself through the emotional turmoil of ever letting it become an actual thing in my head, something I actually knew." She paused, blinking to disperse the tears pooling in her eyes. Quinn does the same and they both know but they're going to maintain that they've only cried in front of one another five times. "Does that make sense?" she asked tentatively, propping her legs up next to Quinn's.

"Yeah," Quinn sighs contemplatively, blowing a thin plume of smoke out into the still night sky. "It makes complete sense." She pauses, and looks down at her hands. "I love you, you know."

"I love you, too."

Neither of them move because it's sort of fulfilling enough to just stare out over the humming cars and sirens beneath them and know that the other is there.

"We're grown-ups, right?" Quinn says after a moment of silence, and Santana just nods.

"Finally, yeah. I think we are."

* * *

Brittany stood alone in her packed up studio, watching through the huge bay windows as New York was set into a summery twilight where the air hung low and the people walked slow. She couldn't get the time off work to travel to California the full week before the wedding, but it was okay. Her flight was later that evening – she would still call it a redeye because the whole experience was tiring - and her belongings were piled in the back of Samuel's truck and probably on the way through Kansas as he and his wife took a week-long impromptu photography trip, cutting a line through the great United States of America.

Samuel was mad and dumb, or perhaps he was just madly dumb; but he had offered to help her take her stuff over and had he not she knew she may never have gotten round to it.

It made sense, of course; for them to live in San Francisco. Brittany knew she had nothing that really tied her to the Big Apple, and the ease at which they came to the decision of where they were going to live _together _just meant that the surrealism of this whole thing continued and Brittany felt like she was in a strangely perfect bubble.

It was just that this was New York, and it had always been there. She was so small here, just another washed up dreamer for whom life hadn't quite worked out the way they had wanted; and she was haphazardly happy with how it was more likely for nobody to really give a shit and how her actions had little consequence in a city full of people doing the exact same thing, pushing and pushing.

She had loved the lack of responsibility and the freedom of just being one person out of eight million and knowing that the things she did didn't really matter. Maybe that was why she travelled; maybe it wasn't just an obsession with her own wanderlust, maybe it was because she moved on so fast and barely left her imprint on a place and she liked the idea of not having anything holding her down.

But now everything was changing, and she was going to have a wife and an adopted daughter and a steady job, and she was scared. Her studio was piled with boxes full of costumes and props and old fashioned vinyl records, and she suddenly felt very small in a big room and a big city, and she knew that she had finally moved on.

It was time to leave and stop being lonely but not alone, and Brittany took a calm step towards the door with her jaw clenched, promising herself she wouldn't cry.

"It's time to leave and stop being lonely but not alone," she said to herself in the mirror. "It's time, Brittany Susan Pierce."

Her hand closed around her phone reflexively as she walked purposefully past the speaker system, and she gave in. One last dance in New York City, Regina Spektor's Eet filling the studio, suitably bittersweet and slow as the dusk sets in through the window and the light in the room is low. Brittany dances like she has never danced before, like there's emotion is pouring out of her with every tap and extension and arch of her back and toss of her hair.

And when the dance is done, she's done too; so she shuts off the lights and locks the door and walks straight out, not looking back, because she's ready.

* * *

It was a small wedding at a small venue with a small amount of family and friends, but it wouldn't be the same if Rachel Berry wasn't singing.

Well, Santana had actually paid her twenty dollars and five extra songs later in the evening as compensation for insisting that Blaine sung the song that was to be their first dance as a married couple, and Rachel had accepted the payment and slunk off to plan routines with Evelyn while Blaine picked up his guitar and tapped the microphone a few times.

"One, two, one, two," he says, blowing a raspberry into the microphone, making his little daughter giggle and clap her hands. "Cool. I'm honoured to be up here singing a kooky little love song to two of the kookiest lovely women I've ever had the pleasure to know, and I think I speak for all of us when I say that it's been a truly special day."

He clears his throat, and Santana smiles at him.

_"Can't you see that it's just raining? There ain't no need to go outside…"_

Brittany leads, of course, and Santana hooks her arms around her neck and stares up at her, their faces within inches of one another's. "Are we crazy?" Brittany whispered, slipping her hands to Santana's waist and bringing both of their bodies full circle, Santana's dress skimming across the silky fabric of Brittany's trousers. She had wanted to wear a suit because a her best black top hat and a white dress would have looked odd, because nothing about this was normal so why should she confine herself to a traditional clothing code, and because her legs were still fucking awesome and they still went on forever and it was still plain black trousers that made them look the best.

Santana's dress was red, because she wanted it to be. "Oh, yeah. We're crazy," she says with a gentle smile, looking up and finding Brittany's bright blue eyes. "But if crazy is happy, then I'd take being crazy with you any – day – of – the – week."

"_Lady, lady, love me, cause I love to lay here lazy; we could close the curtains, pretend like there's no world outside…"_

They fit, with Santana's arms around Brittany's shoulders and Brittany's hands holding Santana's back. They always have done, and they always will do.

"Hey, you know what we haven't spoken about?"

"What, B?" Santana smiles, again. Her happiness sort of terrifies her.

"Well, there's a few things. Firstly, we haven't spoken about how beautiful you look tonight. So there it is, you look beautiful tonight, and I'm sure there're more than a few people in here who're wishing you're going home on _their_ arms."

She winks, and Santana's cheeks redden very slightly. She continues. "Secondly, we haven't spoken about what we're having for dinner tomorrow night. So here it is, I'm going to cook us a nice meal, probably with like, some sort of elegant fish. And we won't get food poisoning because I know after Sam got sick that if it's pink, it's probably not right."

Santana can't hide her wince and Brittany flicks her lightly on the nose, grinning. "And thirdly, we haven't really spoken about _this_," she says finally, biting her lip and forcing herself to look straight into Santana's dark eyes.

"Go on, Britt," Santana says, even though she knows exactly what Brittany's talking about.

"This. Us. What we are," Brittany clarifies, suddenly spinning Santana around and tipping her backwards, making her laugh.

_"We don't need to we got everything, we need right here. And everything we need is enough; it's just so easy…"_

"We're married," Santana replies, her heartbeat quickening despite herself. Married, she thinks to herself. Just like that. How strange.

"Do you not think that we could be… something?" her new wife speaks lightly, the corners of her eyes creasing with contentment.

"What's a something?"

"A something. You know, a something." Brittany's words and face are coy, and she brings her hands down a little further on Santana's body, lighting a little trail of fire through her dress and onto her skin. Heat.

Santana pauses before she answers, a long and drawn-out silence in which the two of them have shifted to a proper waltz hold and have begun slowly spinning around. "Yeah, I think I could be down with that. Us being a something. A backwards something, a something in reverse."

Brittany stops completely unexpectedly and her lips crash against Santana's with the salt of a few stray tears and the tang of the cherry lipgloss Santana has always worn too much of.

They both understand at the same time. For Brittany, it's like the release of a thousand little butterflies from every part of her body, and they just want to fly about and jump and dance and if they were physically able, they would sing and scream too. For Santana, it's like something flooding through her bloodstream that makes her heart beat faster than it ever has before and makes her want to just burst into tears with the fervour of the love she feels coursing through her veins.

For a second, they're lost, together.

"Mami?" comes a small voice from beside Santana, tugging at the top of her flowing skirt, looking slightly embarrassed to have interrupted the moment.

"Yeah, mija?" Santana breaks away from Brittany and sweeps a hand through her hair, taking Evelyn's hand and squeezing it.

"Can I dance, too?"

She looks so sincere and wide-eyed that Santana almost giggles, but she manages to stop herself in time to nod and murmur an 'of course, baby'.

"But you're too tall!" Evelyn complains, holding one of Santana's hands and one of Brittany's way above her head.

"You've been spending too much time with Rachel –" Santana starts, but Brittany shushes her and sweeps Evelyn onto her strong shoulders while the girl claps and squeals.

"That better, Eve?" Brittany calls, twirling and pirouetting to some powerful ballad that indicates Rachel has commandeered the microphone and will not be relinquishing its control for quite some time.

"The best, mom," she shouts happily, screaming and whooping as Brittany moves faster and faster as the song builds, couples throwing themselves out of the way of the madness ensuing.

Quinn appears at Santana's side, and the two of them watch as Brittany throws herself around the dancefloor with an eight year old perched on her shoulders. "Did you ask her to call her mom?" she murmurs, sliding her arm through Santana's.

"No," Santana says simply. "No, I didn't." Brittany winks exaggeratedly and she winks back with a little wave to Evelyn.

"Maybe it was just meant to be," Quinn muses, taking Santana's hand and rubbing her wedding ring, admiring it in the light.

"Yeah, something like that."

Brittany waves again and Santana wipes at the tears that have crept up on her and keep making their tracks down her face.

* * *

_Berry,_

_I guess I'm emailing to thank you for the stunning Tiffany's charm and homemade card because we finally got them in the post yesterday, but I have one little amendment to sort of clear with you._

_I am not 42. I am 27, and I always will be. Please respect this when you write in huge letters on the very front of your next delightfully personalised card._

_Other than that, no quibbles. I love the charm and I'm sending your present out next week, just so it arrives for your actual birthday. I know, I know. I'm really fucking nice. Don't open it too early._

_Quinn sends her love from next door. Even though she moved here three years ago I'm still struggling with the fact that she's right there. It's just strange. Daniel broke his wrist a couple of weeks ago falling from a treehouse (I know, right? Idiot) and she's been having to wash his hair for him and dress him and shit, so she's been pretty traumatised for the past few days and I'm guessing it's going to continue for a few more. I would be finding it funnier, but she's really stressed out and I feel sort of bad. Brittany cleaned her kitchen the other day and she burst into tears. Give her a call this coming week, I think she'd really appreciate it. And if you really have to sing then make it something mellow, for fucks sake. Please._

_Brittany says hi too, and she sends a belated thank you for the fifth anniversary present. She's going to New York next month to attend a choreography seminar – am I being too much of a lawyer about it? Is it rude to say it's not a real thing? – and she's going to call you herself later to try and arrange some shit, so that should be nice. This is going to be weird but I'm going to tell you anyway - we took a bath together a couple of nights ago (candles, romantic CD, and shit, you know me) and we were just talking, and I asked her whether or not she was joking about curling her hair in the tub that time like, twenty five years ago. Some things just stick in your head, you know? Like the time you praised me for telling a sapphic love story in song and you didn't think I would know what the word meant so you actually sat the fuck down for once when I bitched out at you. But yeah, about the curling thing. She wasn't joking. Like, that's a thing. That happened. I thought you should know and be as mind-blown as I am._

_Eve misses you, and she keeps asking when you're next coming to visit. I keep telling her that you're moving over to California so when you do next see her prepare yourself for an onslaught of emotional blackmail. In all seriousness, it's a move I think you should consider. Go on. She's moved on wholly to Les Mis now, and she fancies herself as an incredibly tragic Eponine. She could do with someone to either educate her about other musicals - so I don't have to smash her head through a wall after nine renditions of On My Own - or to outsing her. You better come and see us before the next few months are over._

_She's so grown up now, it's scaring me. I'm not allowed in her bedroom anymore. She plays the piano better than I do, and she can hit all the notes when we try and do For Good. Brittany wants to send her to a performing arts school, but I'm torn. Like, you're actual living proof that you don't have to have some sort of privileged background to make it big, but I don't know if stuff has changed since then, you know? She's happy at school at the moment; she's more like her mom than her mami so she has a lot of friends, and she's looking forward to going to middle school with them all. I feel like she'd resent me for splitting her away, but Brittany really thinks we have something that we should pursue. Help me, Midget Oracle._

_And Britt and I are getting on absolutely wonderfully. Here are some attached photographs of the two of us and our daughter being beautifully happy on some beach in San Mateo, receiving jealous looks from all those around us._

_I'm totally joking._

_Sort of._

_We do make the hottest couple ever, right? Even for some chicks in their late twenties._

_Damn, we're so perfect. I'm not even mad it took so long we're that perfect. I know. How crazy is that?_

_Anyway._

_I heard it through the grapevine – Mercedes Evans (once a gossip, always a gossip) – that you've been getting pretty serious with the guy in the building opposite yours. Messages written on postcards and stuck up in windows? Really? It's like a movie storyline, honestly, Rachel. Your life. You're telling me everything, and I'm not asking, I'm instructing you._

_Eagerly awaiting your reply,_

_Santana aka Hot Mama aka Snix_

_X_

_(p.s Evelyn keeps reading over my shoulder and she would like to apologise for the fact I called you the Midget Oracle. She says it's bordering on barefaced rudeness, and I think it's a really nice thing and complimentary for me to have said. Don't leave us hanging.)_

_(p.p.s she's also offended at my 'joke' about smashing her head through a wall, so I'd like you to confirm that I have been known to attempt physical assault on those who will not shut up. Thanks.)_

* * *

__Brittany leaves a little sticky-note on Santana's steering wheel every evening. On the fifteenth of May, it reads -

**Today was officially the first day of the rest of my life six years ago. It does make sense, read it again. I love you, completely and utterly. I think about how we were both so lonely and you emailed me back because you just needed to have someone with you and that someone just needed to be me and I kind of want to faint because it's so beaijdklqueid, perfect. I am so deliriously happy I don't really believe it most of the time, so thank you thank you thank you for being so amazing and hot and the best wife and friend and lover and person ever. Love from ? (your secret admirer.)**


End file.
